The suicide bond

Cherie Blair doesn't deserve the hard time she has been getting from the press. Here are her main offences: chairing a few seminars in Downing Street, failing to wear a hat for the Queen's Golden Jubilee service in St Paul's, and sounding a little sympathetic towards Palestinian suicide bombers. This is rather a feeble record of villainy.

If I feel little outrage about her seminars at Number 10, I feel none at all about her hatlessness in the cathedral. If she were to appear hatless at Ascot, that might be another matter; but the Church of England is relaxed about such matters. And if she had worn a hat in St Paul's, she'd doubtless have been accused of seeking a "more prominent role" in the Jubilee celebrations, just as her husband was said to have done at the Queen Mother's lying in state.

More serious is the charge that she made a diplomatic blunder when she said of the Middle East turmoil, "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress." This led the front pages of most newspapers next day. Maybe it would have been better if Cherie had prefaced her remark with a condemnation of the bombing, but what she said wasn't in itself controversial. Earlier on the same day, Jack Straw had said something pretty similar: "When young people go to their deaths, we can all feel a degree of compassion for those youngsters. They must be so depressed and misguided to do this." And even more to the point, given the Israeli embassy's public complaint about Cherie, so had the Israeli defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eleizer.

The Israeli minister had visited two failed Palestinian suicide bombers in jail in order to find out "what the fuel is that drives suicide attackers"; he concluded that it was "despair". He even said that Israeli army actions, while necessary, had kindled this despair, making young Palestinians more susceptible to the pressure and persuasion of those who sent them into Israel to die. "As soon as the Palestinians have a new dream of a truly better life, of a normal life, the whole bit about the virgins in paradise and all the other nonsense they've sold them will lose its magic," the minister told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.

Cherie Blair's analysis of the suicide bombing phenomenon is therefore identical to that of the Israeli defence minister, though rather more cautiously expressed. The only interesting thing, then, is whether or not their analysis is right. Is it, in fact, true that lack of "hope" is behind the bomb attacks? It is reassuring to think so, for it suggests that a solution is possible - that you need only give the Palestinians freedom and autonomy within their own state, and they will stop blowing people up.

But isn't it possible that a bombing campaign launched in defence of Palestinian rights has become subsumed into a greater struggle between Islam and the west? Its apologists don't even mention Palestine very much any more. They emphasise instead the nobility of any form of martyrdom in the cause of Islam.

Some people may have found Cherie Blair provocative, but what about the Saudi ambassador to Britain, Ghazi Al-Qusaibi? Not only has he written a poem in praise of a woman suicide bomber, but this month he said in an interview that the only thing required to achieve martyrdom was to die "so that the words of Allah will be supreme". This sounds like an invitation to blow up every non-Muslim in the world. (The ambassador added that he'd like to be a martyr himself, if his age and weight permitted it.)

An excellent new book by the distinguished Indian journalist MJ Akbar (The Shade Of Swords, Routledge) traces the centuries-long history of the conflict between Islam and Christianity, inflamed today by the world dominance of the US. And it's hard to see how it will ever end while there is still a Muslim mother who can say of her dead son, as one did last week, that she encouraged him to die a martyr's death because she loved him and because martyrdom was the key to his eternal happiness.

Even the suicide note left by the young man who caused the massacre in Jerusalem on the day of Cherie's "gaffe" didn't seem to indicate despair or lack of hope, but rather a state of exultation: "How beautiful it is to kill and be killed," it said, "not to love death, but to struggle for life, to kill and be killed for the lives of the coming generation."